Artificial life basically means entities of life made by man as opposed to nature. In order to create artificial intelligence the traditional scientific paradigm of analyzing the whole to discover the nature of its parts is reversed to a synthesis of the parts to create the whole. Because we are carbon-based life forms (and all life as we know it is), we cannot assume universal properties of life from only one example to study. This is because we cannot know what properties of life are universal because our one “carbon” example limits us to only ourselves and carbon-based properties of life. Thus, “Artificial Life is the name given to a new discipline that studies ‘natural’ life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other ‘artificial’ media. Artificial life complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like organisms” (Introduction 1).
On one level artificial life is about biological engineering that seeks to build artificial life systems that have the potential to surpass life as we know it because it allows us to create a better mouse trap-in other words, life as it could be-once we know the basic universal building blocks at our “construction” disposal. By using the building blocks of life to construct synthetic life forms we are able to develop a deeper understanding of life itself, an understanding that can be translated into practical application, particularly where technology and computer software and hardware are concerned. If we assume everything is matter and life only includes those things that persist through duplication and causal flow, then we can reduce the number of universal mechanism that exist in order to come up with a universal language of...